Mr. Punch's History of Modern England. Volume 3 of 4.—1874-1892. Graves Charles Larcom
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Название: Mr. Punch's History of Modern England. Volume 3 of 4.—1874-1892
Автор: Graves Charles Larcom
Издательство: Public Domain
Жанр: Зарубежная классика
isbn: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/47300
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He works with the sweat of his manly brow, and I with my body and brain – poor Clerk!
Why did I marry? In mercy's name, in the form of my brother was I not born?
Are wife and child to be given to him, and love to be taken from me with scorn?
It is not for them that I plead, for theirs are the only voices that break my sorrow,
That lighten my pathway, make me pause 'twixt the sad to-day and the grim to-morrow.
The Sun and the Sea are not given to me, nor joys like yours as you flit together
Away to the woods and the downs, and over the endless acres of purple heather.
But I've love, thank Heaven! and mercy, too; 'tis for justice only I bid you hark
To the tale of a penniless man like me – to the wounded cry of a London Clerk!
Fair but Considerate Customer: "Pray sit down. You look so tired. I've been riding all the afternoon in a carriage, and don't require a chair."
The verses lack the desperate poignancy of Hood's "Song of the Shirt," but they made their mark and were quoted in their entirety in The Times. Subsequent articles and verses especially single out the telegraph clerks as the victims of State slave-driving. Punch declares that there was no rest for the telegraph "operator," and describes a letter of appointment from the Government to one of this class as being really a death warrant, offering £65 a year with the prospect of rising to £160 after twenty years' service. Early in 1881 he writes under the heading, "Wiredrawn Salaries": —
The giggling girls, precocious boys, and half-starved clerks, who form the Telegraphic Staff of that money-grubbing department of Government – the Post Office – have petitioned for a slight increase of pay, and have been officially snubbed for their pains. They have petitioned for eight years, and for eight years they have received no answer. The Manchester clerks were too wise to petition. They struck, and their demands were at once attended to.
New Views of the Strike Weapon
This is not very polite to the ladies, but the comment is significant, since it shows that Punch was, on occasion, ready to abandon his old view of the inefficacy of the strike weapon. In June of the same year he announced that "The worms have turned": —
The chief art of Government is to do nothing with an air of doing much. The best administrators are those who have thoroughly mastered the axiom that zeal is a crime, and who are clever at sitting upon troublesome questions. Unfortunately there are questions that will not be sat upon, and the grievance of the Telegraph Clerks is one of them. The Government have "considered" this grievance so long and so dreamily, that at last the discontented Clerks have threatened to strike. They may not at present have the organization and the command of funds of the "working man," who is always on the verge of striking, but these will come in the fullness of time. The Government have roused a spirit of self-reliance in these overworked and underpaid servants of a money-grubbing department, which no tardy concessions can destroy. The patronizing, not to say fatherly articles in some of the newspapers will encourage this spirit, for under the tone of warning is an ill-concealed fear that skilful telegraphists are not to be obtained from the fields and gutters. How much better it would have been to have "considered" less and acted more, and have yielded gracefully.
The Government were not, however, the only offenders whose parsimony excited Punch's indignation. In 1878, when the wages of the railwaymen on the Midland were reduced, he prophesied increased inefficiency and more accidents. Railway servants were, in his opinion, overworked and underpaid. Twelve years later, in the autumn of 1890, Major Marindin, in his report on the collision at Eastleigh, found that an engine-driver and stoker had failed to keep a proper look-out, but noted that they had been on duty for sixteen and a half hours. Punch's comment took the form of the cartoon of "Death and his brother Sleep" on the engine. The overloaded country postman had excited Punch's compassion in 1885, and in the same year the outrageously long hours – sixteen a day and seven days a week – imposed on tram drivers and conductors had come in for severe censure in an article which also mentions the sweating of East End tailors' apprentices. It was this scandal, and the campaign which it provoked, that led to the appointment of a Royal Commission with Lord Dunraven as Chairman. Punch joined in the controversy with a whole series of articles, cartoons, and verses. His first contribution was headed with a picture of a fat fur-coated contractor raking sovereigns out of the "sweating furnace," and took for its text Lord Dunraven's statement that "as regards hours of labour, earnings, and sanitary surroundings, the condition of these workers is more deplorable than that of any body of working men in any portion of the civilized or uncivilized world." A set of ironical advertisements followed of clothes made by sweated labour, including "The Happy Duchess Jacket – straight from a fever-stricken home," and "The Churchyard Overcoat," the product of slave-labour in the East End. Then we have "The modern Venus attired by the Three Dis-Graces" – a stalwart fashionable lady waited on by three starveling sempstresses; a mock Ode on the Triumph of Capital, full of ironic eulogy of Mammon; and, most remarkable of all, a long sardonic poem, published in September, 1888, under the heading, "Israel and Egypt; or Turning the Tables," which is at once an indictment of, and an apology for, the Jew Sweaters.
Punch prefaces the poem with two extracts: —
"The Children of Israel multiplied so as to excite the jealous fears of the Egyptians… They were therefore organized into gangs under taskmasters, as we see in the vivid pictures of the monuments, to work upon the public edifices. 'And the Egyptians made the Children of Israel to serve with rigour. And they made their lives bitter with hard bondage in mortar and in brick and in all manner of service in the field.'" – Smith's Ancient History.
"The Sweater is probably a Jew, and, if so, he has the gift of organization, and an extraordinary power of subordinating everything – humanity, it may be, included – to the great end of getting on… The conditions of life in East London ruin the Christian labourer, and leave the Jewish labourer unharmed." —The Spectator on Sweaters and Jews.
Jews and Gentiles
The verses compare the treatment of the Israelites under Pharaoh with the modern sweating of the Gentile by the Jew middleman: —
Yes, the Gentile once "sweated" the Jew,
But the Hebrew has now turned the tables; Dunraven will tell you that's true.
Swell (at West-End Tailor's, to the Foreman): "Ah – look here, Snipson, I've been reading all about this Sweating System, don'tcherno! – and as I find that the Things I pay you Eight Guineas for – ah – you get made by the Sweaters for about – ah – Two-and-Six – I've made up my mind – ah – to do the thing well, without screwing you down. So – ah – just take my order for a Seven-and-Sixpenny Dress Suit."
The moral is summed up in the last four lines: —
And, behold, though the Sun-God is silent, the Son of the Sun-God asleep,
Still merciless Mammon is master, the slaves of the Gold-God still weep;
Be his ministers Hebrew or Gentile, his worship is cruelty still;
Still the worker must sweat 'neath the scourge that the stores of the tyrant may fill.
Lord Dunraven withdrew from the Commission, and Punch congratulated him on his retirement, though it "seemed caused by a fad," when the Report was published in 1890. The recommendations were inadequate, in Punch's view. He spoke contemptuously of applying the "rose-water cure" and whitewashing the sweater, whom he depicts as a monster vampire. Socialism, as we have seen, was a serpent of the boa constrictor type. The tendency to big combines was typified by an octopus, labelled Monopoly, controlling cotton, iron, coal, salt and copper, СКАЧАТЬ